While Matt is busting his ass down at City Hall, I’m in his home country, eating fish and chips and reporting one part of a scandal far larger but far less salacious than Portland’s homegrown variety. I am “embedded reporter” with ex-Guantanamo Bay guard (and Portland Iraq Veterans Against the War Organizer) Chris Arendt and ex-Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg as the unusual pair roadtrip across the UK on a speaking tour.
Today Begg’s iPhone has been ringing nonstop as everyone — the BBC, ITN, some sort of Middle Eastern public access tv show, another BBC channel — are calling to get the famous former detainee’s reaction to Obama’s announcement this morning that he will end military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.
Seems like Blogtown will be dealing with enough today just trying to sort through local politics, but if you’re interested in a former Guantanamo Bay guard and prisoner’s opinions on Obama’s first big policy decision, the story is below the cut.
First of all, it quickly becomes clear that many of the reporters calling about Obama’s closure of Gitmo’s military tribunals don’t exactly know what military tribunals are. That’s understandable because the tribunals are a complicated, bizarre process that the Supreme Court twice declared bunk. I explained the tribunals here under “Guantanamo Basics” as concisely as I could if you’re interested, but for now just envision a Gitmo tribunal as something resembling a trial. But imagine that the judge was a military official, the defendant was considered guilty until proven innocent and no one could discuss any evidence against the defendant because it’s all classified. Does that make sense? No? Good, it shouldn’t. In June 2008, the Supreme Court declared that “enemy combatants” held by the US in Guantanamo and other prisons are entitled to Constitutional rights that the whack tribunals process ignores.
So Obama declaring an end to the tribunals means he’s just doing what the Supreme Court said the Bush Administration was legally required to do six months ago. OMG we now have a president who’s following the law! Whoo! Phone the media!
Or as Chris Arendt says, loudly during a cell phone interview with someone as we speed across the English countryside toward a speaking gig in Manchester, “What do I think of Obama stopping the tribunals? Uh, not much.” Arendt was deployed in Guantanamo for 10 months. Appalled by what he saw, enforced and experienced there, Arendt joined Iraq Veteran’s Against War after returning home. “The detainees stopped the tribunals,” says Arendt, “they stopped participating in them because they thought they were so bullshit.”
The point is that Obama’s promised to close Guantanamo, but shutting down Gitmo is just the first step – and maybe the easiest – to making America’s detention policy reasonably fair and legal.
“Too little too late,” says Moazzam Begg to the barrage of interviewers, “Simply saying he’s going to suspend the process doesn’t mean anything. He could restart it, he could keep the place [Guantanamo] open for several more years. The only thing significant thing is that the first act of his presidency has been to start a discussion about the Guantanamo process.” Begg, who was imprisoned in Gitmo for two years, points out that while Guantanamo is the best known prison for American enemy combatants, there are American detention facilities like it all over the world. Some of them you’ve heard of — like Bagram, Kandahar and Abu Ghraib but the CIA also runs an unknown number of secret prisons. Since the people being imprisoned in those secret prisons aren’t acknowledged by the US military, they’re called “ghost detainees.” “It’s the principle of detention without trial that’s the big issue,” says Begg.
